Posts Tagged ‘Matthew 18:21-35’
Learning a Different Pattern – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35
The agrarian poet Wendell Berry wrote:
We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.1
We are each radically dependent upon our Creator, who holds each creature in life every moment. And we are horizontally embedded in a web of dependence, one creature upon another, simply by being alive. Berry uses the poignant language of sacrament or desecration to characterize our response to both God and the creatures on whom we depend. How we live in response to the continual gift of creation may either lead us closer to or further from its Giver.
The gospels routinely use the language of indebtedness to name both our vertical dependence upon God and our horizontal dependence upon other people and creatures. Read More
Why Forgive? – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
It’s no wonder that Jesus made such a big deal of forgiveness in his teachings and in his parables. Forgiveness is essential to healthy human relationships. The French Jesuit and theologian, François Varillon, once said, “People cannot live together unless they forgive each other just for being who they are.” We all need to forgive and be forgiven, over and over again, if our life together is to be life-giving, and if we are to be the agents of healing and reconciliation in the world that Christ calls us to be.
Sometimes it’s easy to forgive. We find no difficulty in setting aside the incident and moving on. But at other times we may find it extremely difficult to forgive the one who has hurt us. We may believe that we should forgive; we may even want to forgive. But we recognize that our heart is so full of anger and pain that we cannot yet say, “I forgive you,” and mean it. A declaration of forgiveness at this point would be dishonest and premature. In circumstances like these, we can at least set ourselves on a path towards forgiveness, recognizing that arriving at forgiveness is a desirable and necessary goal, not only because we are commanded to forgive one another “seventy times seven,” but also because forgiveness will rid our hearts of the toxic presence of resentment, anger, and bitterness. Read More
Practicing Forgiveness in the Midst of Resentment – Br. Jack Crowley
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If you came here tonight expecting some lighthearted readings, I’m sorry to disappoint. You know things are serious when Jesus starts using words like prison and torture. So, what’s the cause of such gravity?
Forgiveness. Jesus is talking about forgiveness. In our Gospel tonight, Jesus frames forgiveness in serious and powerful tones.
We know the power of forgiveness. We know this already in our hearts. We know what an amazing feeling it is to forgive and be forgiven. We know those awesome moments of reconciliation when friends heal rifts and grow stronger.
We also all know the power of resentments. Resentments have the power to strangle moments of joy out of our lives. Resentments have the power to keep us up at night, fuming in our beds. Resentments have the power to harden our hearts and make us into people we don’t want to be. Read More
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant – Br. David Vryhof
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Poet and author Elizabeth Barrett Browning is probably best known for the words she wrote in a letter to her future husband: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Her father, Edward, was a controlling man who forbid any of his twelve children to marry, and when Elizabeth defied her father’s wishes to marry Robert Browning, her father never spoke to her again.
Elizabeth wrote weekly letters to her father in the hope that they might be reconciled, but for ten years there was no response. Then one day, after a decade of silence, a box arrived in the mail from her father. Her excitement quickly turned to anguish, however, when she opened it and found that it contained all of her letters – unopened. Edward Barrett’s heart was so hardened towards his daughter that he didn’t open a single one of the hundreds of letters she wrote to him.
Unforgiveness does that. It hardens the heart. It magnifies the perceived offense to the point where we can no longer appreciate a person’s value because all we see is how they have grieved us. If forgiveness is one of the most powerful forces for redemption in the Christian faith, unforgiveness is one of the most powerful forces for destruction. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus gives us a parable that speaks to us about forgiveness and unforgiveness.[i] Read More
To Know God – Br. Lucas Hall
Matthew 18:21-35
To know something is, in our imagination, an intellectual endeavor. To know something is to study it, to ascertain its dimensions, to come to conclusions about it, to test those conclusions, always refining your conclusions based on that testing, and to be able to articulate what you’ve learned to another. This is a valuable and useful approach, and it’s consistent with the general standard of knowledge that Western culture has adopted in the modern era.
But I find it lacks. I find it unsatisfying. It, perhaps, can sate my intellect, but I find that that’s not enough. As much as I’d sometimes like to be, I’m not merely an intellect. And as I learn to have less fealty to my intellect and more loyalty to my full humanity, I increasingly find this approach to knowledge to be somewhat sterile. Helpful, useful, yes, of course. But after this meal of the intellect, I often walk away feeling undernourished.
It is reassuring to find, then, that this is an incomplete understanding of the idea of knowledge in Christianity. St. Ephrem, a fourth century Syrian deacon and hymn writer, put forth the idea that there were three ways to attempt to know something.1 The first, the crudest, the most rudimentary, is a pursuit of knowledge that seeks to dominate the subject that is to be known. This is knowledge merely as a means to an end. There is nothing inherently wrong with coming to know something purely in service of some other goal, but it is no full depiction of Christian knowledge Read More
How Often Should I Forgive? – Br. Eldridge Pendleton
Ecclesiasticus 27: 30-28: 7
Psalm 103” 8-13
Romans 14: 5-12
Matthew 18: 21-35
In his recent excellent treatise on contemplative prayer, BECOMING CHIRST, Brian C. Taylor gives this description of redemptive living Jesus frequently referred to as the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. Read More